A national movement that claims its purpose is to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity is beginning to take root in several states. A state legislative panel begins investigating whether Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities are indoctrinating students in left-wing ideology. Student monitors on a campus in Colorado tell professors that they will be reported if they are, in the judgment of the monitors, inappropriately political. Organized pressure is brought to bear on several schools to require that they teach the theory of intelligent design. Resistance to doing so is labeled "bias." In differing but overlapping ways, these are alarming challenges to the independent intellectual judgments professors make daily that continuously define and redefine academia. In this article, the author touches on both, but the main focus is on the need to consider just how significant the art of indeterminate judgment is. The author believes that this art is essential to scholarship, and that, while academic judgment is not the same as political, it is complementary to it in important ways. Throughout the article, she tries to locate tangles and contradictions on all sides that could keep readers from thinking clearly about various positions on the matter of academic judgment.